The Voice as Something More (co-editor). The University of Chicago Press. In preparation.

“Voice, Gap, Break, Crack,” in The Voice as Something More. In preparation.

The Castrato Phantom: Encryptions and Voice, from Moreschi to Fellini. In preparation.
Provisional title; an ethnography and critical history of the castrato aftermath as seen through family, new media, urban memory, and psychoanalytic theory of transgenerational trauma.

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Berkeley: University of California Press, Autumn 2014. Chapter 3, "Red Hot Voice"The Castrato is the first book to explore in depth why thousands boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that although the practice formed the foundation of Western classical singing, it was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satires, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice also encompassed a logics of reproduction, involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives. Yet what lured audiences and composers, from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini, were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices. The phenomenon was ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality, which castrati failed to survive. But their musicality and vocality, central role to this study, persisted long after their literal demise in traditions that extend to bel canto repertories and beyond.

"Shadow Voices, Castrato and Non". School of Music, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. March 7, 2014.

Judith Zeitlin

Co-faculty sponsor of the graduate workshop in Theater and Performance Studies

PublicationsThe Culture of Entertainment in Early Modern China: Voice, Text, Instrument, University of Chicago Press.

Co-Editor, The Voice as Something More, University of Chicago Press. In preparation.

"'Notes of Flesh' and the Courtesan's song in Seventeenth-Century China." In The Courtesan's Arts: Cross Cultural Perspectives, ed. Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 75-102.

Talks
“Theories of the Sounding Voice in Early Modern China,” for A Voice as Something More, University of Chicago, Neubauer Collegium, Nov. 20-22, 2015. In preparation.

Seth Brodsky

The Composer's Voice in the Age of Post-humanism. In preparation.
New large-scale book project, plus large-scale digital data collection project.

“The Composer's Voice in the Age of Post-humanism,” for A Voice as Something More. In preparation.

"The Tale of the Castrato and the Cantimbanco: Language, Narrative, and Authenticity in the Late Settecento Singing Voice, " Transnational Opera Studies Conference (TOSC@), University of Bologna, Italy, June 30 - July 2, 2015. Talk.

“The Lyric Mode of Voce: Song and Authenticity from Orfeo to Ossiano, 1769-1815.” Dissertation in progress.

Marcelle Pierson

"The Voice under Erasure: Singing, Melody and Expression in Late Modernist Music." Dissertation in progress.

“Voice and Techné in Music for 18 Musicians,” National Meeting of the American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory, Milwaukee, November 2014. Talk.

Steven Rings

Publications
“Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice: Sense and Surplus.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68/3. Forthcoming, fall 2015.
Colloquium contribution on methodological issues related to the analysis of the popular singing voice.

A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan in Performance, University of Chicago Press. In preparation.
This book project presents a longitudinal study of the fascinating transformations in Dylan’s live performances of a small handful of songs over the first five decades of his career and develops new music-theoretical technologies to engage the sonic trace of his performances in all of their granular detail. Of particular relevance to the Voice Project is a chapter that contends with the diverse voices Dylan has employed over his career, voices saturated with echoes of countless other singers, from Odetta to Elvis Presley to Umm Kulthum. Rings draws on recent theories of voice, identity, and meaning to theorize two dialectics at the heart of Dylan’s vocal practice. The first, between phoné and logos, emerges in the friction between Dylan’s celebrated words and their often inscrutable sonic delivery, while the second turns on the paradox that Dylan often sounds most like “Bob Dylan”—that familiar vocal caricature—when he is most strenuously imitating others.

Talks
“Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice: Sense and Surplus.” Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, November 8, 2014. Conference paper on methodological issues related to the analysis of the popular singing voice.

“’Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’: A Genealogy.” Talk presented for the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Franke Forum Lecture Series, Gleacher Center, Chicago, February 4, 2015.
Lecture on the influences that shaped Dylan’s song, with attention to thematics of voice.

“Screamlines,” for A Voice as Something More, Neubauer Collegium conference, Nov. 20-22, 2015Theater of the Mind : Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012.

Welles on the Radio Plus War of the Worlds, On October 27, 2013 UChicago Professor Neil Verma gave a talk on Orson Welles and radio drama to mark the "War of the Worlds" 75th anniversary broadcast at the Music Box Theatre.

“Inside/Out: Jeff Buckley and the Voice Interior,” with Steven Rings, in connection with The Voice Project, sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, The University of Chicago, in preparation for University of Southampton, February 20, 2016

“Shadow Voices, Castrato and Non." Talk. University of Chicago, 18th and 19th Century Studies Workshop, June 4, 2015; New York University, Department of Music, December 11, 2014; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, October 8, 2014.

Discussion Materials:
Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice"
Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Introduction and Chapter 3, "The Physics of the Voice," just through the first part on the "Acousmatics of the Voice"

Meeting Summary:

Primary topics of discussion included acousmatic sound, the relationship between sound and voice, and the voice as a marker of authenticity.